Geneva Relaxes As Sludge Dumping Ends

January 30, 1986|By Mark Andrews of The Sentinel Staff

GENEVA — Residents of this water-conscious community in northeast Seminole County are breathing easier now that sludge from the Iron Bridge regional sewage treatment plant no longer is being dumped at the nearby county landfill.

But after a meeting this week with county officials and representatives of the sludge-hauling company, residents say problems with the dumping are not as severe as they had thought.

''We have a few diehards who say any kind of sludge is bad,'' said Lorraine Whiting, secretary of the Geneva Citizens Association.

Most residents, she said, accept the fact that dumping at the Osceola Road landfill was done only on an emergency basis and that it should pose no hazard to Geneva's groundwater supply.

Sludge, a byproduct of sewage treatment operations, was taken to the landfill from Iron Bridge for about a week earlier this month because heavy rains would not permit the normal spreading of the material on private agricultural lands, said Tom Lothrop, Orlando's wastewater bureau chief.

The material was held in lagoons until a special 5-wheeled machine could haul it around to be sprayed on woods and grassy land.

The sludge should not be a threat to groundwater because pollutants in solid form are not able to leach very far into the ground, said George Frenz, president of Frenz Enterprises of Sanford, the company that hauls and disposes of sludge from Iron Bridge.

Geneva residents are protective of their water supply because most of it comes from what is called the Geneva Bubble, an underground layer of rock formations saturated with fresh water, which rests on top of -- and is surrounded by -- a much larger formation of salt water.

Orlando has been paying a private company to haul away Iron Bridge's sludge since October 1984 because of the shutdown of sludge-drying equipment at the plant. The drying operation was halted once in 1983 and again the next year after neighbors complained of an odor like that of burned chicken feathers.

Whiting said that along with concerns of water pollution, residents were bothered by the convoys of large trucks that passed through Geneva each day on their way to the landfill, which is about six miles away.